Im starting part time courses this semester in University so i have more time to read if i can plan it well and still have time for school work. My plans are detailed because i know what i read too little of in 2011.

* Read 8-10 novels/collections by African based authors. To get closer to important general fiction, good genre fiction and explore modern history of Africa and its literature. Im starting Things Fall Apart by Chinu Achebe.

I want to do a Malazan reread and finally get to Dust of Dreams and Crippled God, both of which I've been saving.
This year I hope to get to the Riyria series by Michael Sullivan, Wars of Light and Shadow by Jany Wurts, and listen to the ASoIaF audio books.

* Read 8-10 novels/collections by African based authors. To get closer to important general fiction, good genre fiction and explore modern history of Africa and its literature. Im starting Things Fall Apart by Chinu Achebe.

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Allow me to recommend Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which I would have included in my 2011 fantasy course if that hadn't had to be abandoned. It is really weird. Also, consider reading Elechi Amadi's The Concubine.

I don't usually have a "year's reading plan" and this one isn't very romantic or interesting and doesn't accomplish anything specifically enriching. It's just that I have approximately one billion unread SF books. My plan for 2012 is the same as it's been for part of 2011: I've got the unread pile split into "one title or series I haven't read by author X" and "the second title or series" and the third and so on. I'm basically down to a handful of "third title" books and, once I finish those I'll start on the "second title" books. There are exceptions (I'm reading a "second title" guy now and may be reading or re-reading a big chunk of the complete works of another next, and there's one author I have a zillion of that I've given up on for now), but this is the general plan.

I know you weren't asking about how many we intend to read, but that's kind of core to the plan - I managed to average about a book a week last year and I have to do much better than that this year or it's going to take all year just to get down to the "ones" and I can't be happy with the pile until I'm at least there. So I basically have to read 50-some books this year but would like to do it a lot faster than that. There was a time when I could do it in maybe three/four months.

So far, so not good.

(But I do agree with you, Connavar, that I'd like to tend to start reading newer stuff as I read proportionally too many classics (or at least old titles), too.)

1. Reading as many of Dickens' 14 novels as I can as part of the anticipated discussion group we will be conducting here as a way to celebrate the 200th Anniversary.

2. Finally posting under my New Horizons thread in addition to launching my blog. This means reading and reviewing several key texts of World Literature, both those that fall under the category of so-called 'Fantastic Literature' and those that do not.

3. As a follow-up to pt 2. reading according to specific themes, probably organised predominantly by country or region. For example, I'm seriously looking at starting with the theme of the modern Russian novel, equating to a review of several of the major Russian works from Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time (my current book) predated perhaps only by Pushkin's classic 'prose poem' Eugene Onegin right through to contemporary authors like Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya etc. I will also want to cover the key works of the 'Latin American canon' this year and if I do exceptionally well perhaps other parts of Europe as well as some of the classics of Asian and Arabic literature.

4. If I get the time reading and reviewing some of the less well known SFF writers.

Allow me to recommend Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which I would have included in my 2011 fantasy course if that hadn't had to be abandoned. It is really weird. Also, consider reading Elechi Amadi's The Concubine.

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Those are two excellent Nigerian authors you quote there! ..albiet I've not read The Concubine yet. I would like to add a third, which I'm sure you would have included had your course had the go ahead. It was the winner of last year's prestigious World Fantasy Award, the book being Who Fears Death by American-born Nigerain Nnedi Okorafor. Nnedi has already won several literary awards, so this latest honour shoudn't really come as a surpirse. Admittedly I have not read the book myself yet but it is defniterly one of those that I do intend to read and review in 2012.

Mine is just to read as many books as I can. I'm a spring chicken who's trying to get faster and faster at reading so I'm just going to read everything I can get my hands on. I'd be lying if I said none of it will be Stephen King.

3. As a follow-up to pt 2. reading according to specific themes, probably organised predominantly by country or region. For example, I'm seriously looking at starting with the theme of the modern Russian novel, equating to a review of several of the major Russian works from Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time (my current book) predated perhaps only by Pushkin's classic 'prose poem' Eugene Onegin right through to contemporary authors like Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya etc.

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I will going into depth with Dostoevsky's Demons and Brothers Karamazov in the next five months. If you think it would be appropriate to start threads on these books under General Book Discussion, that would be great. Brothers is the greater novel, I daresay, but Demons exercises a prophetic fascination upon me. I'd keep it if I had to get rid of nearly all of my books.

Those are two excellent Nigerian authors you quote there! ..albeit I've not read The Concubine yet. I would like to add a third, which I'm sure you would have included had your course had the go ahead. It was the winner of last year's prestigious World Fantasy Award, the book being Who Fears Death by American-born Nigerian Nnedi Okorafor. Nnedi has already won several literary awards, so this latest honour shoudn't really come as a surprise. Admittedly I have not read the book myself yet but it is definitely one of those that I do intend to read and review in 2012.

....Wow! One of my reading goals for this year 2012 is to get into some of the material by and about Tolkien that I have had on hand but haven't read yet.

And I'm just finishing what seems to be Tolkien's final completed work from Middle-earth, which has the form of a philosophical dialog -- which at the end becomes a rather poignant and intimate implied story.

"I was young and I looked on his flame, and now I am old and lost. He was young and his flame leaped towards me, but he turned away, and he is young still. Do candles pity moths?"

I am really impressed. It appears on pp. 304-326 of Volume 10 of The History of Middle-earth, Morgoth's Ring, which seems mostly to be materials relating to The Silmarillion that Tolkien was working on late in his writing career, after LOTR had been published.

I wouldn't recommend this piece unless you've read LOTR and The Silmarillion, but it shouldn't be overlooked.

Art is by the great Patrick Wynne, for a passage elsewhere in Morgoth's Ring.

1. Reading as many of Dickens' 14 novels as I can as part of the anticipated discussion group we will be conducting here as a way to celebrate the 200th Anniversary.

I probably won't be on board for Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Son, but I should think I could participate in discussions of many of the others. These two I haven't read and I'm not sure I will get to them this year.

I will going into depth with Dostoevsky's Demons and Brothers Karamazov in the next five months. If you think it would be appropriate to start threads on these books under General Book Discussion, that would be great. Brothers is the greater novel, I daresay, but Demons exercises a prophetic fascination upon me. I'd keep it if I had to get rid of nearly all of my books.

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OH now that is interesting....

I will be reading and reviewing a number of let us call them 'key Russian texts' (not that I'm any sort of an expert nor as well read as you are regarding some specific periods of Russian Literature) but if I can begin a discussion then certainly your input would be most valued.

I have never read Demons but will probably try and include it in my current reading project. Brothers Kazmarov in my opinion must surely be one of the great works of not only of European but World Literature. I hold it in as high a regard as any other Russian work I know of. Speaking of which I hope to cover as many of the following as possible in 2012 (or realistically a predetermined subset): Tolstoy's Anna Karenina & War and Peace, Bulgakov's Master & Margarita, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Nabokov's Lolita, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Sholokov's Quietly Flows the Don & Gogol's Dead souls (I can't yet comment on Lermnotov's A Hero of our Time, which I'm currently reading, nor Andre Bely's St. Petersburg or Pushkin's Eugen Onegin). Short stories are of course another area I hope to explore further in 2012.

...Lolita???
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. It's probably the most famous work by any of the Russian greats. (Not that I'm an expert: I staggered drunkedly through War and Peace, cried myself to sleep on Crime and Punishment and that's about it.)
I intend to fill some gaps in my fantasy library. Apparently I've been missing out on some staples. George RR Martin, Erikson, R Scott Bakker and as much Terry Pratchett as I can.

Gollum, I see Demons and The Brothers Karamazov as (among many other things) twin visions of what Russia's future could be: Demons indicating the dark destiny, Brothers, after much darkness, the bright: conflagration or resurrection. Of course there is a beautiful restoration in Demons, while it is Brothers that contains some of Dostoevsky's most apocalyptic writing!

I don't think Dostoevsky necessary consciously planned the two novels as complementary, but that's how I'm looking at them now. Even the similarity of the titles (plural persons) works for this perception. And the way the novels are often printed there's a striking contrast that supports this "take" on them (that they are complementary) : one ending with "Stavrogin's Confession" involving a crime against a young person, the other ending with the young people gathered together crying "Hurrah for Karamazov!"

I expect to be reading Demons approximately in Feb.-March and Brothers in March-April.